Bingo! Came here to say thrift store lamps as well.

Here’s one I got for $4 and restored one evening last week.

Yo OP! Took this just for you because I LOVE warm, ambient light. The Tiffany lamps are thrift stores finds, I think $10 and $15? Lamp on the left is also from a thrift. The alien egg I bought off a guy on /r/LV426. Handmade, $150 I think. It’s about my only original art I didn’t create myself. (Made the stand out of scraps though!)

This is a good one. Matt Gaetz came out for something to do with childcare costs or maternity leave, I forget, but I was stunned.

Is Captain Phillips (2013) old yet? I’m sobbing at the end.

I remember a 90s Newsweek issue centered around China becoming the tiger in the next century. Believed that since then, and history seems to be bearing that opinion out. I just didn’t see America crashing so hard, only China slowly overtaking us.

I’m OP’s age and don’t remember having any toys from Japan. Dad fought in the Pacific Theater, didn’t have a positive outlook on Japanese people or products. Funny thing though, we would hunt flea markets, antique shops and garage sales for “Made In Occupied Japan” stamps. Wonder if that’s still collectible?

That’s who I saw things growing up in the 70s-80s. China was full of starving farmers and not much else. And yeah, Japanese products went from having a well-deserved bad rap to Americans going, “Holy shit! They’re out competing us! Make it stop!” (In cars and electronics anyway.)

Fuck all that. 5th-grade me didn’t sleep for two weeks behind that seeing that shit in the theater.

Not true. If a single child is shot, or even shot at, it’s national headline news. Caveat: That doesn’t apply to inner-city children shooting each other. We, uh, don’t talk about that.

If you look at some stats a “school shooting” is any time a gun goes off on school property. I could go down to the elementary school and pop one off at midnight. School shooting.

“Mass shootings” go this way as well. We all have an event in mind when that term comes up. There’s quite a gap when you look at lies, damned lies and statistics. :) You might note that Mother Jones and The Violence Project are anything by conservative sources.

That’s me. I had no idea other families were affectionate and said crazy stuff like, “I love you.” My god, they even hug.

To this day I struggle with affection, even though I love it. If you touch me unexpectedly I’ll involuntarily flinch. I don’t mind, at all, but I still jerk and can’t help it.

Why the hell can’t you spell colour?!

You might like The Laundry Files books by Charles Stross. Exactly that plays out in one book where elves invade Earth.

The premise is that magic is real, and can be summoned/controlled by the appropriate application of mathematics. If you discover this truth, you’re irrevocably attached to The Laundry, basically MI6 for supernatural affairs, and you can never leave.

The protagonist is an IT nerd in England. He almost flattened Wolverhampton with a new algorithm he discoved but they caught him in time. His wife is a protagonist in a few books, and she’s a delight. One of my favorites is where a bunch of high-end accountants accidentally make themselves vampires.

That plays out in the Discworld novels. The idea is, pray the man about to kill you is a bad guy, because he’ll fuck around, gloat, maybe make a mistake. If he’s a good guy, he’ll kill you instantly.

Exercise for it’s own sake sucks. Find something physically challenging and fun. Kayaking is a great example, and not the crazy fast rapids type. Hiking is great exercise as well. Dedicate a pack to it and keep modifying it untill you’re carry what you want and need. LOL, mine’s about 25lbs. with beer and a little shotgun. You get the idea, even if those things aren’t your jam.

You might be surprised what you can find on maps! Zoom out and see what’s out there. Found a park by the Navy base that few locals know exists. Been exploring this area for years and there are still places close by I’ve never been.

Solid answer! Guess I’m a cow patty for even asking, but you came to the rescue.

Why was the US funding FOSS projects? That strikes me as weird, inappropriate and suspicious.

Was gonna say, you gotta be fit as hell to even get a place in something like that.

Didn’t realize I felt exactly the same. Same goes for stores. If the local store screwed themselves in my favor, I’d likely say something. If the big box store fucked up? LOL, mine.

That take is anything but disagreeable. Please read the assignment.

I’m on my 13th or so read of Blindsight. Think I’ve unpacked it all, finally. I feel like a fruitcake having read it and *Echopraxia" so many times, but damn they’re deep.

Not a fan of all of Watt’s novels, but those two feel like he packed something to think about into nearly every single sentence. Easy read if you want to go fast, or, take your time and dig in. Never read a novel(s) that could go both ways.

Fuck me. Just talking about it is getting me hype for another run.

Blindsight:

"I brought her flowers one dusky Tuesday evening when the light was perfect. I pointed out the irony of that romantic old tradition— the severed genitalia of another species, offered as a precopulatory bribe—and then I recited my story just as we were about to fuck.

To this day, I still don’t know what went wrong.”

Echopraxia:

“Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there were`t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.”

Third run through Discworld in the past 2 years. My god, been trying to think how to explain to my best friend. I lack the words.